Parameters and settings for service assurance, traffic engineering and service reliability (amongst a plurality of other network services), are often determined and defined based on the bandwidth of a link. This is the case for committed information rate (CIR) and excess information rate (EIR) settings of an Ethernet virtual circuit (EVC). Time synchronization protocols such as IEEE 1588v2 also require a link with a stable bandwidth in order to derive and maintain clock synchronization between a pair of networking devices. Flow control mechanisms have been used to adapt to the bandwidth of a link or network segment (ref: U.S. Pat. No. 8,139,485). Such flow control protocols require the knowledge of the protocol at each node in the segment.
By being able to detect and measure the available bandwidth of a link or network segment, it is possible to react to a change in the available bandwidth and adjust impacted parameters (for instance CIR and EIR) or adjust the clock synchronization between a pair of networking devices in order to attempt preserving the quality of the services offered over a link when its bandwidth is negatively impacted by spurious or permanent degradation, spurious degradation being sometimes common for wireless links suffering from temporary weather impairments and external sources of interference.